Your brand is the essence of who you are and what you deliver, but how you tell your brand story is all in the narrative and to get the right narrative, you need to be strategic.
The idea of a brand strategy is around communicating who you are to potential or actual customers, addressing the future direction of your business and planning how to counteract any competitor moves in your market.
Before you begin any brand strategy, you want to ask yourself two questions.
- How is your brand perceived today?
- How do you want it perceived in the future?
You will be able to answer these questions in relation to a few important factors; your vision/mission, your goals/ideals for the business and its future or descriptive words that describe who you think you are as a character or personality. For example, “we are cutting-edge, spirited and efficient”
The key factor here is to consider who you are talking to and whether what you are saying will resonate at all with consumers, that is why when you are developing your brand strategy, you want to make sure it does 3 things:
Every brand strategy requires 3 core elements
- Excites consumers hearts and minds
- Creates a strong defence against competitors and the future
- Communicates what you are and what you do
Marketers usually focus solely on the consumer talk, not remembering that something that speaks to consumers now may not be relevant in the future of the brand. If you’ve developed your brand only to speak to the market now, it is likely that you’ve developed a brand that will become irrelevant in future markets.
A great brand creates a solid base for creative solutions, allowing the business to remain agile and adaptive to changing consumer wants and needs, allowing for growth.
Review your brand and messaging, make it agile, so that when there are market changes, whether that be the entrance of competitors or a change in the offering, you are able to adapt to those changes quickly.
If necessary a brand story can be engineered in reverse, creating a brand and building a relevant story around it.
Brand strategies are not about marketing jargon and aspirations, they are about discovering who you are and where you want to be in the future, both in the marketplace and the consumer’s mind.